The Most Important 2 Minutes from Adobe's Conference Call (ADBE)

Wondering why Adobe Systems is trading down almost 5% in pre-market trading this morning? Here's the key excerpt from Adobe Systems' conference call last night (excerpt from the full ADBE conference call transcript):

Murray Demo, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

The main reason why we reaffirmed the revenue today is we really want to talk about the third and the fourth quarters. We’ve now said for sometime that the third quarters are seasonally weak quarters and are going to be the lowest revenue quarters of the year. And look at a number of estimates out there that does not seem to be the case for many out there. We wanted to speak to that again, but the third quarter is going to be the lowest revenue quarter of the year, because it’s seasonal weakness that we see in the summertime in Europe and Japan.

And the fourth quarter now we’re going to see a seasonal pickup in Europe like we would typically expect, and we have the launch of Acrobat in the fourth quarter. So, it’s going to be the highest revenue quarter of the year, and so we wanted to communicate that again about Q3 and Q4.

It was appropriate to also talk about the full year revenue target, which we’re doing today, and at this point we’re not going to talk about earnings per share or margins we’ve provided, Q2 guidance, and we’ll probably continue to look at it doing it on a quarterly basis.

And a short while later:

Larry Solomon, Capital Guardian

And then finally, it sounds like you did not reiterate the $26 to $39 GAAP guidance that you provided earlier. Bruce, are you basically saying that you’re still comfortable with that and that is still the guidance, you’re just putting it in writing each time.

Bruce Chizen, Chief Executive Officer

Larry, we don’t want to reaffirm anything else other than the revenue. We don’t typically every quarter comment on the fiscal number on the annual number for the year. We typically do quarter at a time. This quarter was important for us to comment on the revenue because we wanted to get clarification particularly on Q3 and then subsequently Q4, and we looked at some of the estimates out there as it related to Q3 and Q4, and it was concerning especially given the fact that at the analyst meeting we did communicate that Q3 was going to be the weakest quarter of the year, yet many chose not to listen to us. So, we thought it was important to restate it again. In doing so, we want to make sure everybody understood we were not restating or changing the original revenue number. We didn’t want to go through all the details we got in the rest of the P&L. Clearly, the EPS that we delivered this quarter, what we’re guiding towards in Q2 should give everybody comfort in what we can deliver for the fiscal year.